Posts by DailyLlama 193 publicly visible posts • joined 16 May 2016
My "office hours" have not changed while I've been working from home. My work laptop lives in my spare bedroom/office, and does not come out of there unless I'm going to the physical office building.
I do not go into that room before 9am, or after 6pm. Those are my contracted hours, I do not get paid overtime, thus no overtime happens.
to a colleague who had been to watch Man Utd lose the Champions League final to Barcelona.
I got approval from our manager first, and he was just as big a joker as me, so happily went for it.
He eventually asked me how to get rid of it after seeing the grinning Barcelona team as his wallpaper for two weeks.
I arrived at work one morning to be greeted with the news that "someone tried to install Java on one of the MFD printers, and it didn't work".
As I was pre-coffee myself, it took me a while to work out what they meant. When I got upstairs, I found that someone had put a pint of freshly brewed coffee on the sorter unit of the MFD (cost ~£20,000), and proceeded to print out their days instruction booklets. Whereupon the sorted had duly started moving up and and down rapidly, and spilled the pint of coffee into the printer.
Fortunately this user was only a partial idiot, and had turned the printer off to prevent anything too bad from happening... so I separated all the parts I could, and we dried as much as we could with paper towels, and then I raised a ticket with our printe management company. Who turned up a couple of hours later, and miraculously, nothing had gotten inside it.
It did smell nice for a couple of weeks though!
When wireless mice first came out. Except they only had two channels, so if more than two people were using them, everyone's equipment quickly becamse useless.
And for a joke, when you were bored, you'd just change the channel on your mouse and move it around a lot and wait for the cries of surprise and annoyance from your colleagues.
Even better were the keyboards. Change the channel, and type something like "This is IT, your account has been suspended for watching too much porn"
We had a complete technophobe of a marketing director, back in around 2002, who never used his computer. He'd always come to us to dictate emails (despite none of us being secretaries), and when we asked him why, he complained that his computer was really old and slow. And to be fair, it was the last 486 in the building, so we ordered him a shiny new Pentium 3.
When it arrived, I took out his old computer, and he took the opportunity to rearrange his office a bit. Meaning that the new computer was now too far from the network port, and I needed to get a new cable. We didn't have any of the right length in stock, so I ordered some new ones, and told him that I'd be back to install the cable in the next couple of days.
Things happened, there was a weekend, and it was 6 weeks before he came back to me to say that his new computer didn't work... SIX WEEKS!
The company I worked for acquired another smaller company, and after a few months closed them down, making everyone redundant.
When we turned up at the site to start collecting all the equipment up, one of the senior senior managers noticed a flashing light on a label printer, and asked someone what it meant. "Probably a paused print job", came the reply. So he pressed the button next to it, releasing a job of 5,000 labels saying "<company name> are c@nts!"
Highly amusing for everyone except the manager...
I was in my office one day circa 2001, and "someone" came in and put a Zip disk (remember them?) into the drive of a computer used by someone who wasn't in that day. Then went back to their own desk.
Then I noticed the activity light flashing a lot, and being a nosy bugger (and not trusting this person a jot), I opened Windows Explorer and went to the Zip drive, and found that the disk was filling up with images of women who had clearly gotten too warm, and decided to remove all their clothing.
Screenshots were duly taken (of filenames, not the images), and information sent to HR & Management, whereupon the user in question claimed that he was "copying it for a friend who didn't have internet access). Management then decided that even though there was a precedent of sacking people caught doing this kind of thing, that he merely merited a warning.
It's partly due to naff content, partly that I've seen pretty much everything I want to watch from them over the last two years, and partly that although I have access to Netflix, Amazon Prime, Sky Movies and Disney Plus, there are still things that I can't get.
I'm not going to get any more subscriptions, especially when things disappear from them and someone else gets to decide what I can and can't watch. Everyone has suddenly decided that they need their own streaming service, and you can only view their content on that. I've had enough of them all, I want one service with access to all of them, so I can pick and choose the few shows/films I want to see, and not pay for all the rest of the dross that I will never watch.
Also, while I'm on a rant, how do Sky get away with charging you for access to channels, and then forcing you to watch adverts. If I'm paying for a service, I expect to get it without adverts. And if you insist on having adverts, then why am I paying for it?
I've had that with a Powerline network. Was using it for a few months until one day everything seemed really slow, and I couldn't see my media server. so I went to the router, and found it was for Sky broadband, which surprised me as I was with BT at the time...
I've had a 390 mile round trip from Uxbridge to Newton Abbot and back in a day, just to press return on a server. Mainly because this server was locked in a secure room, and I wasn't allowed to tell anyone on site the code for the door (the two people who did know were off sick or on holiday in the USA), and my colleagues in Chester worked out that I was closest to Newton Abbot, but only by a few miles.
I do that with crossword clues. The act of reading the clue out loud makes you hear it as well as read it, and a different part of the brain thinks about it and bam you have the answer, often before you've finished reading the clue out, which annoys/frustrates everyone who's listening.
I got chewed out on a Friday morning once for not answering the on-call phone the previous evening.
It turned out that the pub I'd gone to do the quiz at was in a dead-spot for phone signal on the network that the on-call phone was using, so it never rang. I filed that information away for further use in case I didn't want to take a call again in future...
I once interviewed for a lowly tech position at a financial company, and they made me go to Central London 5 times in total, getting through technical tests, interviews with various engineers, managers, and HR types, and on the last one spent two hours talking absolute nonsense about how great they were.
This was after 3 months of being out of work, so I put up with it, because I didn't feel like I had any other choice.
I had an interview for another company that afternoon. It lasted 45 minutes, and they called to offer me the job before I'd even got home...
A site I worked at had two offices with individual AC units, but whose thermostats were somehow connected to the other office. User in office A decides that she is too cold, and turns the heat up, making office B too warm, where the user turns the heat down. Eventually, office A is near Absolute Zero, and office B is practically on fire, and neither user is happy...
After a few months of this, somebody figured out the issue, and the contractors were recalled to fix the problem.
I was installing some spotlights on the front of my Ford Capri back in the day, and whilst holding the two lights in my hands, my brother connected one cable to the car, and they lit up.
I was wearing rubber soled trainers, and wasn't in contact with any other part of the car, so am at a loss to explain how this worked...
I had a similar thing at a previous job. My tight-fisted manager ordered us all brand new shiny laptops, but decided to save £50 per laptop by not purchasing the built in WiFi cards, as none of our sites had wireless capability.
Less than 6 months later, she's signed an order for £100 per laptop to buy Cisco PCMCIA WiFi cards for us all, as all our sites were getting WiFi installed.
We got away with the "Automated Reporting Systems Environment" for a good 6 months before anyone important noticed it.
We also got "T(company name) Information Technology System" past three very important people, before they showed it to someone as childish as us :-(
Strangely, they were all ok with "T(company name) Weekend Activities Team" as the name of the social club for over 10 years.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2022
